Bubble Wrapped.

The University of Michigan has announced they’re dropping the grading system for first-semester students in an effort to ‘curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-age individuals’, per an article on Axios earlier this week. The plan is to replace first-semester letter grades with a pass/no-credit mark (they can’t even bring themselves to post ‘fail’). Professors would still assign grades, but they wouldn’t appear on external transcripts or count toward students’ GPAs. They call this “grade covering”. The plan is intended to help students adjust to college and better embrace the ‘joy of learning.’ All I see is another ‘everyone gets a trophy’ approach for a generation of students that received participation trophies all their lives and now this trend is continuing into adulthood, because these students have never learned any sort of coping skills. The cynical side of me believes this is just reinforcing that generation to be dependent on authoritarian rule, prompting them…